r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 2d ago
Health Exercise as an anti-ageing intervention to avoid detrimental impact of mental fatigue - Retired people who habitually exercise are more able to fight the impacts of mental fatigue, and outperformed sedentary adults in physical and cognitive tests, new research suggests.
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2025/exercise-as-an-anti-ageing-intervention-to-avoid-detrimental-impact-of-mental-fatigue18
u/mvea Professor | Medicine 2d ago
I’ve linked to the press release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
From the linked article:
Exercise as an anti-ageing intervention to avoid detrimental impact of mental fatigue
Retired adults who habitually exercised outperformed sedentary adults in physical and cognitive tests.
Retired people who habitually exercise are more able to fight the impacts of mental fatigue, new research suggests.
In a paper published in the Journal of Aging and Physical Activity, a team of researchers from the University of Birmingham and the University of Extremadura in Spain worked with groups of adults to find out whether age would increase, and regular exercise would decrease the impact of mental fatigue on a series of cognitive and physical performance tests.
In the first study, sedentary men between 65 and 79 performed worse in cognitive and physical tests compared to 52-64 year olds, with these impairments greater when they were tested in a state of mental fatigue.
A second study with retired men and women aged 66-72 found that performance when mentally rested and fatigued was better in the physically active older adults than their sedentary peers.
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u/threads314 2d ago
Sounds like a typical chicken and egg problem to be honest. Those capable of more exercise will be mentally in a better place, but the reverse is true as well. Nigh impossible to separate cause and consequence…
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u/CutsAPromo 2d ago
Well I mean fitness is a life long endeavour, not something you can pick up in a week.
Realistically people who still work out when they are old have probably done it many years
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u/grundar 2d ago
Those capable of more exercise will be mentally in a better place, but the reverse is true as well.
While that's true, most people who are capable of regular exercise don't, so it's not clear that the exercisers and non-exercisers should be expected to be that different in terms of cognitive capacity.
As a result, their finding -- that people with greater physical endurance have greater cognitive endurance -- is novel and interesting:
"Conclusion: The deleterious effects of mental fatigue on cognitive and physical performance were accentuated by aging and attenuated by habitual physical activity."
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u/PM_ME_UR_ROUND_ASS 1d ago
Researchers actually tackle this causality problem with randomized controlled trials where they take sedentary people and randomly assign some to exercise programs - those studies consistently show cognitive benifits even when controlling for baseline mental health.
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u/threads314 23h ago
Which is not what they did here and in general is riddled with methodological problems as well. People drop out of the intervention arms in a non random manner, know which arm they are in etc etc.
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u/SaltZookeepergame691 2d ago
It is so, so predictable and tiresome to read yet another academic press release that steadfastedly refuses to acknowledge that 1) this study cannot determine causality direction; 2) the data are fully compatible with reverse causality; 3) calls for exercise interventions therefore are unlikely to be as beneficial as claimed
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u/threads314 2d ago
This indeed, reminds me of that study years ago that showed that elderly people who went to church weekly were less likely to die in the coming x years. Completely ignoring the fact that those capable of doing that were in better health to begin with…
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u/EntropicallyGrave 2d ago
did they use the playskool Research-And-Learn! playlab?
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u/WickedXDragons 2d ago
People who are physically active scored better than those who are sedentary. Even Playskool couldn’t have seen these results coming
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u/Xanikk999 1d ago
I feel this is true but not if you aren't getting adequate nutrition like me (autism, picky eater) then it only makes thing worse. I exercise, sometimes excessively so. Lately though I have been very exhausted both mentally and physically after exercise. On days I don't exercise I feel so much better. It used to be the opposite.
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